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I don't know any Republicans eager to catch COVID-19. And I don't know any Democrats who want to remain housebound and worried about their next paycheck a day longer than they have to.

So how did a pandemic that has upended every household become such a partisan issue? And how will Republican elected officials arguing for a swift end to the restrictions that have closed most businesses and dramatically limited most Americans' mobility fare in the long run against Democrats urging a more cautious return to business as usual?

"We're in this together," elected leaders from both parties tell us ad nauseum. But that's mostly a lie.

The fault lines that divided us when this nightmare began — fault lines that have long quarantined Michiganders by geography, by class, by political party and by race — persist, and in many ways the pandemic has sharpened them.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's decision to order a statewide lockdown abruptly altered a stalemate with Republican lawmakers that had seemed likely to preserve Lansing's mildly dysfunctional status quo until the November election. After being reduced to spectator status for most of March, Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield seized the offensive last week, warning that the Democratic governor was unleashing a new economic plague that could eclipse the dreaded virus.

"Under the guise of protecting our health she is DESTROYING our HEALTH by killing our livelihoods," Shirkey asserted in a Good Friday Facebook post that had disappeared by Easter morning. In a slightly more measured social media campaign, Shirkey and other GOP lawmakers circulated the governor's telephone number and urged Michiganders to demand that businesses be allowed to reopen immediately.

'Lock her up!'

Protesters block traffic around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020.(Photo: Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press)

The protesters who paralyzed the state capital Wednesday in a honking, social distance-flouting display of contempt for Whitmer's stay-at-home order went considerably beyond the Republican Party line. Shirkey and his GOP colleagues presumably do not endorse the conspicuous display of confederate flags, the chants demanding Whitmer's impeachment and/or imprisonment, or one protestor's broadcast speculation that the virus had been "created" by the same "corporates" who stand to make a profit from widespread testing.

But House Republicans embraced the mostly-white, mostly out-state protesters’ unifying cause when they issued a press release urging Whitmer to relax commercial restrictions on businesses and residents outside southeast Michigan, "since different regions of the state are experiencing varying levels of exposure." If you listened carefully, you could hear the baritone echo of the late L. Brooks Patterson, who once ventured that Michiganders could treat Detroit like "an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn."

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Protesters block traffic around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Protesters block traffic around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the Coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Protesters block traffic around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Protesters block traffic while others stood on the steps around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Protesters block traffic while others stood on the steps around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Protesters block traffic while others stood on the steps around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Protesters block traffic while others stood on the steps around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Protesters block traffic around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Protesters block traffic while others stood on the steps around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Protesters block traffic while others stood on the steps around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Protesters block traffic while others stood on the steps around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Protesters block traffic while others stood on the steps around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Protesters block traffic while others stood on the steps around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Protesters block traffic while others stood on the steps around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Dan Bush of Clarklake and owner of a landscaping company called Lawn to Lake Services holds a sign as protesters block traffic around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Nancy Mackinder of Lansing holds up essentials as she joins protesters blocking traffic around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the Coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Protesters block traffic around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, to send a message to Gov. Whitmer that the extension of the Stay at Home mandate, in an attempt to lower the coronavirus infection rate, had gone too far. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

James Chapman, of Belleville, left, carries a doll in a noose attached to a fishing pool as he flirts with Anne Marie Darnell of Grand Rapids on the steps of the Michigan State Capitol during a protest where drivers blocked traffic around the capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020, due to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's extension on the Stay at Home mandate because of the spread of the Coronavirus. When Chapman was asked whether the doll represented the governor he replied "who else would it be" Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Renee Aldrich, left, and her son Gavin from Owosso join protesters as they block traffic around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020. "Gavin had his fourth grade trip to the capitol last week that got canceled but we came anyway," said Renee Aldrich Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

Brooke Winsted, left, stands with her mom Jaime Winsted of Grand Blanc as protesters block traffic around the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing on April 15, 2020. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

So how has a virus that ignores our political differences come to reinforce those differences? Liberals say the die was cast back in February, when President Donald Trump pooh-poohed the danger that dismissed any significant number of Americans would contract the virus and ridiculed Democrats for exaggerating the threat.

But that was six weeks ago, practically another geologic age in a season when new political narratives are hurled into the air like skeet, blown to bits in a fusilade of fact-checking, and reassembled, often in radically altered form, in the span of a single news cycle. By the end of March, the ubiquitous b-roll of freezer trucks being loaded with corpses had rendered the toothless-tiger narrative untenable, and social distancing became, however grudgingly, our common creed. It's easier to believe we are one nation, it seems, when we rarely talk to one another face-to-face.

Town and country

Wishful thinkers of all generations predicted the pandemic would unite us, invoking the spirit of 9/11 or, if their memories were longer, Pearl Harbor. But we were fighting the virus on different fronts, and it was only a matter of time before political opportunists began to insist that we were were fighting different wars, and for different causes.

In Michigan's cities, the enemy is the disease, and even death itself. In the blink of an eye, most Detroiters knew a half dozen acquaintances who had contracted the virus and at least a few who had succumbed to it.

But in more sparsely populated regions, coronavirus has so far remained relatively rare, and seemed far less threatening than the economic paralysis enveloping the state.

Whitmer and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan have aggressively shared data documenting the pandemic's disproportionate toll on Detroiters. But their reports, intended to acknowledge the African-American community's particular vulnerability, have reinforced the misconception that those outside that community enjoy some immunity conferred by race, generously sized lots, and rural virtue. The hardships imposed by commercial restrictions and social distancing mandates meant to protect their own health conform neatly to the narrative that they are being conscripted to fight the city's war.

So even the recognition that we are confronting a challenge unprecedented in our lifetimes has failed, so far, to overcome our tribal instincts. With all our worlds turned upside down, we are retreating to our familiar corners. The water may still be rising, but we're far from ready to acknowledge we're in the same boat, much less row in the same direction.

Brian Dickerson is the Editorial Page Editor of the Free Press. Contact him at bdickerson@freepress.com.